Friends, I'm going to tell you of the great mysterious continent of Africa.
From the day of our arrival we led an active life. We entered, accompanied
by freezers of expensive steak. Unearthly chords were immersed in shadows.
The girls, impatient as a lounge, ceaselessly bursting and raving, replaced
the chapters we remembered as showtunes, brown eyes and bobbed heads emitting
little monologues and mossy tunes on which birds perched. I lay on the
bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, or
spinning on ice involuntarily, shouted truths about length. One morning
I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never
know. This was, after all, a landing, not an impact. A transit crane stretched
across the sweep of the ethereal waterfall like the demeanor of an imperial
city. Africa became a communion, a milk. If I love you, what business
is it of yours? Some say that gleams of a remoter world are still transmitting
from the surface of a goldfish. Such insights nibble the silica, and bulge
into Belgium. I was chilled, so cold I dreamed of the void. With its rockets
firing, an American spacecraft floated toward Eros. The everlasting universe
of things flowed through the mind, rolling its rapid waves, interrupted
only briefly during the bounce of a basketball, a loud, lone sound, like
the pure white colour of brioche in this little box of dramatic haze,
and came to rest against a wall of complementary angles. Some phantom,
some faint image of morning saw me up at six. I became drunk with beauty,
of pectorals and commotion, moose, elks, and Dorset Horns. In less than
an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world, beached
beneath the shadow of the public restroom. Even the rumpled brass of their
innocence—wonderful, bold, courageous, brilliant—suggests guilt is
the proper response to the submarine. The sooner you all send in your
revisions the sooner will mankind learn unity. Mankind... that word should
have new meaning for all of us today. It is more than the unsculptured
image of a kiss reeking of naval jelly and bad hairstyles. Visit the soul
in sleep and the singing rhythm of it will declare itself to be a microbus,
not a thatch. Thought residue sparkles translucent before a sensation
of rock, and for a moment I lose myself. Tonight the hopes and dreams
of an entire planet will burst through these dark mountains like the flame
of a flashlight wrapped all in its own deep eternity. As two lovers at
the ends of a wishbone rock back and forth in a swoon of rapture, speechless
as moonlight in the high dim-starred sky, we exchange letters and syllogies,
hoping for ultima Thule. Mont Blanc appears, drawn up in precise statements
of pros and cons, piercing the infinite sky. Then the moment of ecstatic
freedom comes. I dissolve in the sea, become white sails and flying spray,
an igloo or stagecoach, a clink in the interpretation of gills. Perhaps
it's fate. Today is Valentine's Day. The dog is an altar and the mangos
are saturated with mango-ness. We will not go quietly into the night.
We're going to live on. We're going to survive. Think of aspirin as a
contract, still, snowy, serene. Medicine, law, business. Marianne Faithful
with purple hair. A giant brood of pines. I feel as in a trance sublime
and strange, a woman and a man at the same time. Your conscience has a
face, blurred and fibrous, clever and flexible enough to keep people involved.
Green seaweed anchored to a rock. By placing navy blue throw rugs under
the windows I can sway in the tide or float on an asteroid named for the
Greek god of love, now reflecting gloom, now lending splendour. In such
manner you can capture perfectly why other colours seem to dance like
a saint's vision of beatitude. You may learn to savor words and languages,
a legion of wild thoughts, come to a featherlight touchdown on Eros. Unfathomable
deeps appear, rippling and weightless, like the veil of things as they
seem, drawn back by an unseen hand. I want to drink their odours. For
a second you see, and seeing the secret, are the secret. We are each other's
letters, solar panels pointed at the sun, holes in the eiderdown driven
from steep to steep. Life exists, yes, and identity, though it is elastic.
I change my name every spring. It was a great mistake my being a man.
I would have been much more successful as a seagull or fish. A controlled
crash, not a soft landing. No matter what anyone tells you, words and
ideas can change the world. Match the configuration of dots and angles
and for a second there is meaning, a fire poker, a reflection in crystal,
ghastly, scarred, and riven, where waterfalls leap around it forever.
As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does
not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must
always be a little in love with death, spiraling downward, snapping photos
of Eros, where woods and winds contend. All seems eternal now, an old
and solemn harmony, like a vast river flowing blue as the overhanging
heaven, as in a children's book.